Stretching won’t fix your tightness

You’ve got that annoying feeling of tightness and pain that just won’t go away. We get asked all the time what stretch will fix it, or hit with the misconception that if someone had just stretched more then they wouldn’t have the problem in the first place. Only problem is, this is completely wrong.

Stretching won’t fix your “tight” and painful muscle. 

What stretching does do:

• Creates a stimulus for the muscle to adapt to in this case increased length. As a muscle to be at a certain length enough and it will create a little more length within itself to make that easier for it to achieve.

• Change the sensation in the muscle. Muscles aren’t very smart, they can pretty much only do one thing at a time. In this case “pain” will get replaced by “stretch” and it will feel a little better for a while.

What should you do instead?

Figure out why it’s unhappy with you. Have you asked it to do too much? That’s the usual reason. Or you may have actually had a one off injury eg a muscle strain or tear that you remember occurring during an activity. Once you’ve worked out what the aggravating factor is, then you can back that off to allow the muscle to calm down and then rebuild it so that the muscle learns to tolerate it.

If you aren’t sure what has annoyed it, or how to approach this – that’s where we come in! Hit us up for a session and we’ll help you sort it right out.